Last week, after months of growing censorship, Rob Rogers, the 25-year editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was fired. Speculation was that his brand of political criticism wasn’t falling into line with the ownership’s right-wing Trump nuttery. The owner of the Post-Gazette, John Block spoke to Politico over the weekend to defend his decision, and this is what he came up with.
“He’s just become too angry for his health or for his own good,” John Block, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told POLITICO in his first interview since the firing earlier this week. “He’s obsessed with Trump.”
The lazy writing of fascism never ceases to amaze. Block, if you don’t recall, began the process of publicly turning the once lauded Pittsburgh Post-Gazette into a conservative propaganda zine in September of 2016, after the owner of both the Toledo Blade and the Post-Gazette made it clear that he was in bed with Trump.
After the campaign rally, Mr. Trump met with Blade Publisher and Editor-in-Chief John Robinson Block and Blade Editorial Page Editor Keith Burris on his plane at Toledo Express Airport.
At the time, Billy Penn’s blog reported at the time on fearful “rumors” circulating amongst Post-Gazette staff that Block would make his editorial staff endorse Trump as the Republican primary candidate. With this choice paragraph, that should always be remembered.
Some Post-Gazette reporters are worried about their paper’s credibility should it support the billionaire candidate who’s campaigned on a platform that includes deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall between the United States and Mexico and banning Muslims from entering the country.
Remember how Trump was a eugenics racist right out of the gate? Yes, we all do. Some in the media seem to have forgotten that. Earlier this year, Block’s editorial board at the Post-Gazette ran an opinion piece that tried to obfuscate how fucking racist Donald Trump is and how fucking racist his policies are.
Politico reached out to Rogers for a response that he was “too angry.” Rogers called that “completely inaccurate.” And if I’m going to believe someone here, it’s not the guy that apologizes for the single most pathological liar-in-chief I have seen in my lifetime. Rogers, himself, penned an op-ed that ran in the New York Times this weekend. In it he explained that Block and Keith Burris had begun scuttling his cartoons more and more over the past couple of months, even cartoons that weren’t directly about Trump but about race and racism in our society.
Not every idea I have works. Every year, a few of my cartoons get killed. But suddenly, in a three-month period, 19 cartoons or proposals were rejected. Six were spiked in a single week — one after it was already placed on the page, an image depicting a Klansman in a doctor’s office asking: “Could it be the Ambien?”
John Block seems to be something of a white supremacist. He supports a white supremacist for president and tries to extinguish any criticism of that white supremacy. Pittsburgh locals are being done a disservice.